“From Paul, an apostle appointed not by human beings nor through any human being, but by Jesus Christ and God the Father who raised him from the dead, and all the brothers who are with me, to the churches of Galatia. Grace and peace from God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ who gave himself for our sins to liberate us from this present wicked world, in accordance with the will of our God and Father to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.
“I am astonished that you are so promptly turning away from the one who called you in the grace of Christ and are going over to a different gospel – not that it is another gospel; except that there are trouble-makers among you who are seeking to pervert the gospel of Christ. But even if we ourselves or an angel from heaven preaches to you a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let God’s curse be on him. I repeat again what we declared before: anyone who preaches to you a gospel other than the one you were first given is to be under God’s curse. Whom am I trying to convince now, human beings or God? Am I trying to please human beings? If I were still doing that I should not be a servant of Christ.
“Now I want to make it quite clear to you, brothers, about the gospel that was preached by me, that it was no human message. It was not from any human being that I received it and I was not taught it, but it came to me through a revelation of Jesus Christ. You have surely heard how I lived in the past, within Judaism, and how there was simply no limit to the way I persecuted the Church of God in my attempts to destroy it; and how, in Judaism, I outstripped most of my Jewish contemporaries in my limitless enthusiasm for the traditions of my ancestors. But when God, who had set me apart from the time when I was in my mother’s womb, called me through his grace and chose to reveal his Son in me, so that I should preach him to the Gentiles, I was in no hurry to confer with any human being or to go up to Jerusalem to see those who were already apostles before me. Instead, I went off to Arabia and later I came back to Damascus. Only after three years did I go up to Jerusalem to meet Cephas. I stayed fifteen days with him, but did not set eyes on any of the rest of the apostles, only James, the Lord’s brother. I swear before God that what I have written is the truth. After that I went to places in Syria and Cilicia, and was still unknown by sight to the churches of Judaea which are in Christ, they simply kept hearing it said, ‘The man once so eager to persecute us is now preaching the faith that he used to try to destroy,’ and they gave glory to God for me” (Gal 1:1-24).
